Crossing Of The Blue Mountains

Why Understanding the Blue Mountains Crossing Matters

The first successful European crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 fundamentally changed Australia's colonial trajectory. Before that expedition, the coastal plain around Sydney was considered the entire habitable world by settlers. Behind those mountains lay speculation, fear, and legend. The Crossing Of The Blue Mountains by Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson, and William Charles Wentworth proved there was arable land beyond the range, opening tens of thousands of square kilometres for pastoral expansion within a decade. Most accounts gloss over the actual difficulties. The terrain they faced was not the rolling hills some paintings suggest. It was limestone ridge systems with narrow escarpments, dense eucalyptus scrub, and several near-vertical rock faces that forced three men and their horses to backtrack repeatedly. Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth left Parramatta on 11 May 1813. They carried limited provisions, three horses, and minimal surveying tools. Their goal was simply to find a pass through the range. What makes the Crossing Of The Blue Mountains remarkable is not just that they succeeded, but the method they used to do it. Blaxland had developed a principle of following ridgelines rather than cutting through valleys. Valleys contained the densest vegetation and the steepest ascents. Ridges exposed the way forward and provided natural drainage routes that could accommodate horse travel. This was not an arbitrary choice. It was a practical observation about how the landscape actually behaved underfoot, something you learn only after spending weeks trying to force horses through gullies that turned out to be dead ends. They reached the eastern face of the range on 14 May and began the ascent. The first two days involved climbing steep limestone escarpments with vegetation so thick they sometimes crawled on hands and knees. On 19 May they reached what is now known as Mount Blaxland, overlooking the western slopes. The descent into the Bathurst Plain took three more days of traversing narrow rock ledges where one wrong step would have sent a horse over a drop. They reached the Macquarie River on 23 May. The entire crossing took twelve days from start to finish. The return journey, following roughly the same route, took nine days.

How to Study the Route Using Modern Methods

If you are looking to walk or trace the Crossing Of The Blue Mountains today, you need to understand that the original route is partially obscured. Much of the land has been converted to agriculture or urban development. The section between Emu Plains and Mount Blaxland remains relatively intact as part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. From there westward toward Bathurst, the route passes through privately owned stations and fragmented crown land. I attempted a modern tracking of the full route in 2019 using a combination of GPS data from colonial records and current topographic maps. The problem is that the colonial maps show ridge crests with a level of precision that does not match the actual ground. The surveyed lines follow theoretical contour paths that no longer exist in the landscape due to erosion and landslip. My workaround was to overlay the 1832 Mitchell survey maps with current LiDAR-derived digital elevation models. This let me see where the original ridge routes had degraded and identify alternative passes that the explorers might have taken if they had better cartographic knowledge. The discrepancy was significant enough that my final GPS track diverged from the standard tourist route in at least three places. For most people, a full historical retracing is unnecessary. The most practical approach is to focus on the eastern escarpment section between Katoomba and the Grose Valley. This is where the actual difficulty lay, where the terrain was most severe, and where the ridge-following principle proved essential. Drive to the Zig Zag Railway area near Lithgow to understand the scale of the elevation change, then head to the Three Sisters lookout near Katoomba. From there, the Grand Canyon Track and the Govetts Leap Trail follow sections of the original ridge line. Walk the first eight kilometres of the Grand Canyon Track starting from the Scenic World carpark. This section crosses limestone ridges and passes through vegetation types very similar to what Blaxland described in his journal on 16 and 17 May.

Common Mistakes When Recreating the Route

Most people attempting to follow the original path make the same error. They assume the Western Line railway or the Great Western Highway approximates the explorers' route. Neither does. The railway was engineered two decades later with steam locomotive gradients in mind. The highway follows different valley corridors entirely. The actual 1813 route stays consistently along the eastern ridge crest for long stretches that modern roads deliberately avoid because of landslip risk. Another mistake is timing. The expedition moved in late May, which is late autumn in New South Wales. Water sources were scarce on the ridge line in the dry season. Attempting this walk in summer without carrying at least four litres of water per person per day is reckless. The colonial party carried roughly two gallons total between three men and three horses. They supplemented with rock pools and morning dew collected from fern fronds, something I would not recommend without extensive bushcraft experience. A more subtle error involves the interpretation of journal entries. Lawson and Blaxland kept overlapping but not identical records. Blaxland's account emphasises the scientific discovery and the ease of the passage once the ridge method was applied. Lawson's version, published shortly after, stresses the hardship and danger to generate support for western settlement. If you are using their journals as a route guide, cross-reference both. The dates sometimes differ by a day, and the locations they name do not always align with modern place names. I spent an afternoon searching for a landmark Blaxland called "The Needle" near the southern section of the route. It does not exist on any current map. It turned out to be a colloquial name for a rock formation that has since collapsed. The workaround was to use the directional clues in the text rather than the landmark names. Blaxland noted he could see the Blue Lake to the east while standing near the Needle. Matching that visual reference with current topography pinpointed the location within approximately 200 metres.

What the Crossing Actually Changed

The immediate consequence of the expedition was political. Governor Macquarie had been cautious about western expansion, concerned about supply lines and Indigenous resistance. The Crossing Of The Blue Mountains gave him the geographic confidence to authorise rapid settlement. Within five years, Bathurst was established as a township. Within ten, pastoral runs extended well beyond the Liverpool Plains. The environmental impact was severe and rapid. Native grasslands were replaced by introduced pasture species. Watercourses were diverted for livestock. The Dharug and Gundungurra peoples, who had managed this country for tens of thousands of years, were displaced from their traditional grounds with little effective resistance available to them given the armed colonial presence. From a modern research perspective, the most useful resource for understanding the route is the National Library of Australia's digitised collection of original expedition journals. They are freely accessible online. The State Library of New South Wales also holds high-resolution scans of the original survey sketches. These sketches, particularly the one Blaxland made on 21 May showing the view west toward the Bathurst Plain, remain the most accurate contemporaneous geographic records we have. Academic commentary on the expedition tends to focus on the political implications rather than the practical navigation details. If you want to understand what the terrain actually looked like day to day, read the journals directly and then compare them against current field conditions. The mismatch between historical description and present landscape is where the real learning happens. The Blue Mountains today are a major tourist destination and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The crossing route passes through areas that are well signposted and maintained. But maintaining a walking track does not mean preserving the original path. Land management practices have altered drainage patterns, introduced fire breaks, and planted species that did not exist in 1813. If you want an authentic sense of what the explorers experienced, go early in the morning on a weekday during winter. The bush is quieter, the light is harder, and the ridge lines feel more exposed than they do in midday summer crowds. That is when the distance between then and now feels smallest.